


once more with feeling

by SearchingforSerendipity



Category: The Watchmaker of Filigree Street - Natasha Pulley
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, Family, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-30
Updated: 2017-03-30
Packaged: 2018-10-13 01:29:40
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,455
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10503621
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SearchingforSerendipity/pseuds/SearchingforSerendipity
Summary: Six remembers the past.Mori doesn't, because by the time she realizes her weird victorian-setting dreams are reincarnation induced there was already a fine system of decision making in the family to keep private things private. Most people probably don't think the way Six does, but when one of your dads can see the future based on intent to act, cautious decision making is an important life skill.Also, most people probably don't remember their past lives, but Six was just special like that.





	

 

 

 

**i**

 

"I'm home!" Six yells, nudging the front door closed with her backpack.

It is anyone's guess which father she is talking to, but at least one of them is usually around by the time she came home from school. There's no sound coming from the music room so Thaniel wasn't in, and there is no light coming from under the workshop's door either.

"Hello, Six. Your fathers are in the garden," Katsu says. He is splayed out in the sofa, hugging his favorite pillow; presently he detaches one of his tentacles and waves at her. She walks up to him and lets him grasp her finger, waving it a little before letting go and rummaging around the fridge for orange juice. Dad is one of those horrible people that believes pulp was a natural part of juice, so she and Otosōn kept another brand for themselves. It was half empty, and Katsu wouldn't tell, so she drank from the bottle. Then she went out of the backdoor.

Outside it smelled of damp grass and wet soil, a thick familiar smell. Dad is kneeling by a pot of lilac flowers, elbows deep into the mulch and holding a space, while Otosōn was reading in the garden chair and offering suggestions.

"You're going to dig too deep and they're going to choke," he said with all the certainty of someone who had seen the future and the future was full of dead flowers.

"Too shallow and it's bad for their roots, though," Dad argued. He brushed a hand over his sweaty forehead and left a track of mud. Six snickered.

"Six agrees with me," Otosōn said, waving her over. There was no doubt who'd programmed Katsu. "Don't you?"

"I'm a teenager, I disagree with everything as a principle," she said, sitting up in the free garden chair and splaying out her legs comfortably. "Hey Otosōn, hey Dad."

"Hullo Six," Dad said, getting up just enough to kiss her cheek. "Can you go get a spade and very disagreeably help with the aster?"

She groaned and leaned back on the chair. The afternoon sun had warmed the chair just right; Otosōn had probably moved it there on purpose. "Why can't Otosōn help?"

"I'm helping," Otosōn said, slumping on the fluffy chair. "I offer precognitive knowledge about  
future botanical development. It's very tiring."

Dad snorted. "So kind of you to share."

"Isn't it?" Otosōn looked at him from over hid dogeared Asimov anthology. "I feel like I deserve a reward."

Eventually their flirting got so bad Six got up to get the space only to get away. It wouldn't surprise her if that was the plan, but they were genuinely like this all the time. It was embarrassing on a level no amount of experience could help with.

"How was your math test?" Dad asked, somewhere between patting down the perfect shape into the soil and carefully moving the flowers from the pot. They were _aster tataricus_ , called _Tatarinow's aster_ sometimes, and _shion_ in Japanese. It had been Six's idea to add them to their admittedly crowded garden, as the next of Dad's gardening projects.

 Otosōn had given her a curious look at her choice, but hadn't mentioned it. _Shion_ flowers had their own spot in the Japanese flower language as symbolizing remembrance, and in Six wasn't even trying for subtlety on this.

"Eh, it went alright." She was a good student, insofar as she cared to be. She already knew she wanted to be a photographer and math wasn't necessary for that, so she didn't worry too much about it. "It would have been better if a certain clairvoyant someone had told me about Mrs Stalh's trick question."

"Yes, it would have been better," Otosōn agreed. "But your grades aren't in bad enough straits that you need help to cheat."

"You're not cheating at all," Dad declared firmly. She and Otosōn shared a look over his head when he turned away. "And don't do that look thing, I know you're doing it, and I'm telling you two, Six is going to be in trouble if she cheats."

"I'm not cheating," she assured him. Otosōn rolled his eyes; he though Dad's old school integrity was foolish and a little endearing. Six thought it was familiar. "I don't need to, anyway. The next text is on Monday, but it's just history."

"Don't you get lazy now, just because you're ahead of your class in history,"Otosōn warned. "I'm not giving you details, for your teacher is going to be in a bad mood after his wife tells him she wants a divorce and he'll take it on the students. Don't sit in the front row for the rest of the semester."

Sometimes Six's Otosōn was terrifying, but he never stopped being awesome.

"Mr Ford might be a hot mess, but the class load is interesting," Six replied. "We're studying the Irish Independence movement since the beginning." Then, she added, because she had to, "There were bombings and stuff even in the nineteenth century. Near the Home Office and the public service spaces."

No reaction. Otosōn flipped a page. Dad hummed and pruned a thin bough. By now the amaryllis were as comfortable as they were going to be. Six sat back in her haunches and her Dad did the same, leaning on her briefly to shift position.

"Now, look at that. Are the roots alright?"

"They'll hold through winter, at least," Otosōn said.

 

 

**ii**

 

Six remembers the past. 

Mori doesn't, because by the time she realizes her weird victorian-setting dreams are reincarnation induced there was already a fine system of decision making in the family to keep private things private. Most people probably don't think the way Six does, mind fast as quicksilver and twice as resourceful, but when one of your dads can see the future based on intent to act, cautious decision making is an important life skill. 

Also, most people probably don't remember their past lives, but Six was just special like that. 

Her name this time around isn't Six. The foster system of the twenty first century is way better at paperwork than the traumatic clusturfuck of late nineteenth century workhouses. She still got the nickname Six in the foster system, though, because it turns out the universe likes its echoes, and that's what she goes by most of the time. Amelia is for the teachers and the social worker that visits them for the first year of the adoption process. It goes well, because these things always go well when one of the parents is an aristocratic clairvoyant and the other is a world-famous pianist, even if her tendency to speak in the third person warrants more hours with a therapist that she cared for. 

As time passes, her memories solidify with the onset of puberty. Six Mori of Filigree Street had lived a pretty badass life by anyone's standards, but it hadn't been very easy most of the time, and part of her teenage angst was a result of the faded emotions related to those memories. She probably spent more time around her parents than most teenagers, just to make sure that they were there and not old, not laying in a bed with frail old man hands between hers. 

 

 

**iii**

  
Keita Mori died in the eve of the First World War, the last time around, on a cool spring morning with the light falling golden of his death bed. Even now, Six is sure the only reason Thaniel hadn't put himself in more danger in the battles that followed was because of the information he whispered at him before dying, promises and data and duty, to tether him to life, a life of some sorts.

Six? Six had been planning to take up espionage long before that. Keita's last predictions had just given her a little boost.

 

 

  
**iv**

 

Moris are Moris. The name lives on through the centuries, up until Kin Mori, married mother, father unnamed, four brothers and a gift to glimpse the shifting course of the future.

Kin means golden. He tells Samuel Plath ('Call me El, Sam was my father) this on their fist date, because he knew it would make him smile.

 

 

**v**

  
Eventually she gets used to the jarring feeling when she sits down for breakfast and remembers a hundred other breakfast like these in another life, the same people around her drinking the same green tea and powdery scones.

You'd have thought reincarnation would have changed them, if only because of changed circumstances, but her parents were reliable people life that. Basic personality stayed the same; even if the names and the faces were different versions of themselves, there was always something that lingered, in the curve of a smile, a certain tilt of the head.

Many things were changed, of course. Their names weren't even the same. Otosōn was a freelance engineer, still prone to creating clockwork pets far beyond contemporary technology, only this time around they were also Artificial Intelligences that might or might not eventually take over the world. The PTA moms all adored him for his powdery cakes and generous donations to the school's science department.

Granted, the last one was more of a bribe after Six's mostly-accidental experiment-gone-wrong during applied physics class, but to be fair he had been the one to teach her the value of innovation in the hard sciences. That was her story and she was sticking with it.

Dad was, much to his own embarrassment, something of a celebrity. He'd never worked as a telegrapher, although he did have a brief stint at a telephone company while studying at the Conservatory. In a world where sodomy wasn't illegal and women could work enough to sustain their children, he never had to put aside the piano to support his sister, never had any reason not to accept the drink a kind eyed's man offered him after a concert in London.

From what Six understood it had been something of a whirlwind romance, with less terrorist threats and even more blatant pining, if that was possible. By the time Six came along Dad had already dedicated two pieces to his partner, and Otosōn had built them a futuristic AI housekeeper in the shape of an octopus.

 Say what you would about the twenty first century, Six liked it plenty.

  
**vi**

 

Somewhere in the upstairs drawing table is a marriage certificate signed by Kin Mori and Samuel Plath.

They'd gotten married as soon as it was legal to do so. In an hilarious twist of fate only Six understood, Grace Carrow was their witness, since Six had been too young and Grace had been hanging around the Court House arguing about her inheritance. Six spent the whole ceremony grinning, which was only in part because of the irony and mostly because it was a happy day for her family.

Six was given photography duty, and if everyone commented how good the quality of the photos was, they had no way to know she'd been fiddling with cameras since before tripods became obsolete. It was a better way to preserve memories than most.

 

 

**vii**

 

"What are you doing in the summer?" Six asked Alice Hardyson, one week before school closed.

"We're visiting grandma in the country, probably. She's got a pool so it won't be too bad, and honestly I've missed her. What about you, Amelia?"

Six, who went by Amelia more and more these says, shrugged. "Dunno yet. Dad has some concerts in America, so hopefully we'll finally take that trip to the Niagara Falls we've been meaning to for ages. But Aunt Ann called the other day about us visiting, so."

Alice made a face. "Stupid cousins?"

"Stupid cousins." 

It was strange to think that there had been another time and place where they were still neighbors and friends since childhood, with the difference that Alice was an Allen and they hadn't had cell phones to text with.

Alice nudged her. "I bet you're gonna have a great time. And maybe you can stop by my grandma's on the way home, and I'll be able to throw you in the pool. I deserve revenge from that stunt you pulled last summer!"

"You haven't been able to throw in the pool for years."

"Just you wait! One day I'll catch you unawares near a lake or stuff and you'll see."

Six tried to laugh it away, tried not to choke on it.

 

 

  
**viii**

 

Six had had many names, through the course of her last life. Her last one had been Lèa Morel, a french nurse stationed Avignon in Avignon. It had been a good cover that let her pass messages well enough, right up until it didn't.

Lèa Morel had been drowned Rhône river, pulse ringing in her ears like the tickling of a watch.

 

 

  
**ix**

 

Otosōn's office was a space of meticulous if mysterious organization. There was a small space, tough, by the left window, that was all Six's, the same way her old sheets of beginner's music were carefully piled by the piano.

Her father was standing by the desk closest to the high-powered lamp, head bent over a strangely shaped engine.

"What are you making?" She asked, coming closer. Six squinted. "Is that a mango?"

"It's a pear," he corrected crisply. It was a pear, made of gold and everything. "Don't tell, it's going to be El's birthday gift. Something to decorate the garden with." Six wasn't even surprised. Her last Christmas gift had been literally bottled sunshine, even though Otosōn maintained that he didn't celebrate Christmas.

People said Six had no chill, but clearly it was a skill learned by osmosis.

"Did you consider going for a garden gnome, or, like, a flamingo?"

"Did you consider telling me why you're in such a mood for watchmaking, or are you going to keep silent on that?" He asked, concise and straightforward.

"No," she said, because bluntness was also something she had gotten from him. "Maybe later, but probably not. Do we even have cogs that small?"

"In the third drawer," he said. "There are some pliers too, but you'll have to order the chains, or make them yourself."

She went to get the parts for the engine. The casing she would have to weld, which was always fun; Six was a great fan of blowtorches.

"Don't worry, that's not going to he a problem."

 

 

**x**

  
She ended up making three watches. It took half the year until Christmas for them to be perfect, but it was more than worth it. Dad loved his and Otosōn was proud of her and Six had a new weight in her pocket, ticking away a steadfast rhythm to count memories by.

 

 


End file.
